2016 Fall Mountain Trip Part 1; Garlock, CA ghost town

In the fall of 2016 I had a bunch of unused vacation time and decided to head out revisit eight National Parks in California, Utah and Arizona.

The first day of the trip started out early climbing over the Sierras to the Mojave Desert via California State Route 58 across Tehachapi Pass. I made my way to CA 14 north as I was heading towards Death Valley National Park.

After following CA 14 northward to northeast Kern County I took Redrock-Randsburg Road east. After reaching Garlock Road I took it east to US 395 passing by the Garlock ghost town site.

Garlock was the site of a gold stamp mill which was constructed in 1896. Gold in Garlock was mined out the nearby El Paso Mountains and community appears to have been enough of a success to warrant on/off Postal Service until 1926. Garlock appears to have seen secondary use as a rail siding on the nearby Southern Pacific Railroad line which still crosses near the community site. There is actually a substantial number of buildings remaining in Garlock but most are fenced off.

From the eastern end of Garlock Road I took US 395 north to Searles Cut-Off which I used to enter rural San Bernardino County. I next took Trona Road northward towards CA 178 but I'll leave that for Part 2 of this series.

Part 2 can be found here:

2016 Fall Mountain Trip Part 1; the Panamint Gap in California State Route 178

Comments

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third